Most of the Yucca glauca in the Nebraska Sandhills has turned
yellow this summer. Very few are flowering. Last year's flower
stalks are seen in this photo. Photo by Larkin Powell

Ranchers sometimes call it "soapweed" as the root was evidently used to make soap by pioneers. You can try it if you want.

This summer, most of the yucca in the entire Sandhills region has turned a pale yellow. UNL range ecologists first noticed this and have been pondering the event since May. My colleagues informed me that a UNL plant pathologist is currently working to determine the cause, but it is believed a pathogen such as a bacteria may be responsible.

Yup--plants can get sick, too.

Plants may have gotten stressed in the 2012 drought and the severe 2013 winter. No one yet knows if the yucca will recover, or if this will be fatal to many plants. We do know that it is widespread--it is actually amazingly widespread. On a recent trip to view my research projects, my colleague and I saw sickly yucca from Burwell to Ainsworth to Valentine to Thedford, and I recently saw similarly yellow yucca near Ogallala, Nebraska. My photo here is from a ranch southwest of Valentine.

In our entire trip, we only viewed 5-6 flowering stalks as well. Although each yucca plant does not flower every year, you would expect to see more flower stalks that we viewed--evidently the plant is saving resources to fight the pathogen.

What will this mean for the relationship with the plant's pollinators? If yucca disappears from chunks of Sandhills grassland, how will this affect the ecosystem? We'll save predictions until we know more about the fate of the plants, but it is clear something odd is happening to the yucca of the Sandhills this year.

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Responsibility defined

"Above all we should, in the century since Darwin, have come to know that [we], while captain of the adventuring ship, [are] hardly the sole object of its quest, and that [our] prior assumptions to this effect arose from the simple necessity of whistling in the dark."

--A. Leopold, “On a Monument to the Pigeon” in A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There (pp. 109-110).

About Me

I am a Professor of Conservation Biology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I find myself in the role of teacher, research biologist, photographer, hunter, canoeist, poet, and bee keeper. My wife and son are both better photographers. I've written over 90 scientific publications, but I most enjoyed publishing two books of poetry: "Dust and Mud" and "Cursed with Wings."